Google Acts Against Sextortion, Bans Revenge Porn

Google has announced that it will now remove nude, sexual images and videos posted online without a user’s consent. The request to remove revenge porn and explicit photos put online for the purpose of cyber-bullying can be made to Google just by filling up a form. Reddit, Facebook and Twitter have already banned revenge porn.

“We’ve heard many troubling stories of “revenge porn”: an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims’ accounts. Some images even end up on “sextortion” sites that force people to pay to have their images removed.

“Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results. 

“In the coming weeks we’ll put up a web form people can use to submit these requests to us, and we’ll update this blog post with the link.

“We know this won’t solve the problem of revenge porn—we aren’t able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves—but we hope that honoring people’s requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help,” Amit Singhal, Google’s Senior Vice President, wrote in his blog.

The Crown Prosecution Service defines revenge pornography as “typically sexually explicit media that is publicly shared online without the consent of the pictured individual and is usually uploaded by ex-partners”. It adds that the images are often “accompanied by personal information including the pictured individual’s full name, links to social media profiles and address, and are shared with the intent to cause distress or harm to the individual”.

In February, a court in California convicted Kevin Bollaert on six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft for operating two sextortion websites. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. In April, Britain joined Israel, Germany, and 21 US states in making revenge porn a crime. A new clause in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill specifically forbids “Disclosing private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress”.

While Google definitely can’t remove naked images from the Internet or from the porn websites, by removing these images from its search results, the company has made it impossible for people and revenge porn offenders to easily find them. It’s not a solution, but it’s a good start, and gives more power to the victims of non-consensual porn, or people whose intimate photographs and videos were scattered on the Internet without their consent.

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